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You may be familiar with our previous work and support for the UW Foster School of Business, but this year marks a new, exciting endeavor! The UW Consulting and Business Development Center (CBDC) is holding a Business Management Consulting Program via Zoom, and RedCloud is excited to provide a team of mentors to help out.
Four RedCloud mentors, Marie, Sophia, Mary Anne, and Scott, are tasked with guiding and advising the small student teams (4-6 members each) as they navigate a real-life client challenge scenario, devising their own plan for solving it with their business school knowledge thus far. The projects kicked off earlier this year and are in the client presentation phase, after which final meetings will occur with the clients for questions and thoughts on implementing their strategies.
As our mentors work through feedback sessions with their teams, they each work through the clients’ provided situation, looking a lot like this:
Situation: Client A fabricates their own products and is struggling to attract new, large opportunity customers. Their audience is from a generation that likes routine and regularity.
Key Questions from Client A: How can we attract new and larger customer audiences? How can we use technology to differentiate ourselves from our competition?
In working through the challenges faced by each client, the student groups will recommend a solution. The solutions are backed by hours of market research and competitive analysis in mind. The students spend significant time and effort diving into the client’s industry wholeheartedly to recommend the most effective next steps to make a difference. So far, these groups of eager future consultants have done an excellent job, and our mentors are really impressed! Check out what UW Consulting’s Instagram post had to say about the progress.
As an example, the following recommendations could be made to the client:
Project Managers as target customers
Referral Service
Increased networking
Implementation of CRM or MRP systems
Blog posts that showcase Client A’s operations
Continuation of the current payroll program
Pursuing 3D modeling programming in 3 years
We commend each of the student groups for a job well done and look forward to your entry into our industry in the near future. Well done all, and thanks again to our RedCloud volunteers for providing such critical feedback and guidance to these students!